Islam and Human Rights

Hira Amin

Hira Amin

It is the narrative of embattled 'Christian Europe' under attack by Islamic Shariah Law, and the high birth rate of Muslims. Demonstrations against mosques and minarets throughout Europe are about preserving the 'Christian heritage' of the country....

Robert Barsocchini

According to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia got more repressive under the previous dictator, who just died and was replaced by corrupt billionaire Salman bin Abdulaziz, who stands accused of personally supporting al Qaeda....

Adam Taylor

Adam Taylor

Saudi Arabia's interpretation of Sharia law has been called "one of the strictest interpretations" of Islamic law in the modern age, but Fahad Nazer, a former political analyst at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, says the Saudi legal system has become a "red line" that the kingdom won't allow criticism to cross....

Zaair Hussain

Zaair Hussain

He was against the use of pre-emptive violence and forced conversions, growing increasingly estranged from the then chief of the Saud in his later years. Nevertheless, it is Saudi Arabia’s main export alongside oil and forms the ideological backbone of almost every single high profile terrorist group in the world, including al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS). ....

Serkan Demirtaş

Serkan Demirtas

“As Turkey has very rich and different culture compared to the West, it can bring unique perspectives. Turkey is also a melting point that can bring together all the different nations to Istanbul in 2016,” she said, calling on the Turkish government to push all governments, non-governmental organizations and private sector companies to attend the summit….

Inas Younis, New Age Islam

Inas Younis, New Age Islam

We need to recognize that the only difference between the human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and those of any other illicit gang is that a criminal does not expect his victims to sanction his crime with the pretense that he is exercising a right over them. Delaying lashes, or decreasing the number of lashes from a thousand to one hundred are meaningless gestures. If the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia intends to flog their citizens, behead them, imprison women for driving, and deprive them of sunlight, then let them do it in broad day light so the world can see with greater clarity, just how reprehensible their laws are. We need to leave them at the mercy of the one billion Badawi's who might one day be able to do what the most powerful government in the world could not; and that is to say to the kingdom and its monarch- you have no power over us........

Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar

The psychotic followers of these organisations all think that they are Muslims, and their Islam is based on beliefs that millions who subscribe to Wahhabism, the Saudi version of the religion – and its kin, Salafism – accept as essential ingredients of their faith. For example, that Sharia, or Islamic law, is divinely ordained and immutable; that apostates and blasphemers should be killed; that women should be shrouded and confined to four walls and that men are their guardians. This is a widespread version of Islam, made more so by modern communications; increasingly gaining followers in Europe, it can be, and is, used to justify all manner of atrocities. Yet this is an Islam of manufactured dogma which relies on neither the Quran nor the example of the Prophet Mohamed….

Editorial, The Guardian

The punishment of Mr Badawi is a reminder to us all that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an enemy of free speech, of free thought, of honesty and of courage wherever they may be found in the world today. The British government should remember the slogan used against the mafia in Sicily: to be silent is to be complicit....

Yasmin Alibhai Brown

Yasmin Alibhai Brown

Things get even more complex when you think about freedom and Muslims. Muslims living in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia or Turkey have no freedom to say what they think about the political system or the faith. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other nation. Iran is the second-worst country for journalists and bloggers. In Pakistan people are tortured for blasphemy – often false charges trumped up to keep people in line…..

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

The irony is the Ulema of Islam regard the Ahadith (narratives), however insulting to the Prophet, as some kind of indirect revelation and therefore do not muster the courage to say a word against their compilers, narrators or initial reporters. They fail to understand that all such accounts that show the Prophet as a legendary character, let alone a great warrior, a sadist or sexually obsessed are merely fictions of people’s imagination – verbalization of the imageries that rose in the minds of his admirers or detractors. They still study them and keep them alive as part of Islam’s Secondary sources, but if someone who is not a Muslim allows his artistic mind to fabricate something about the Prophet in written or art form or as a cartoon, the hell breaks loose upon the Muslim world……

B.C

His copious writings on the matter are adamant that Islam does allow, indeed insist on, freedom of religious choice, and on diversity of opinion about many matters. He has written approvingly of cases in Malaysia where apostasy (leaving Islam) was allowed….

New Age Islam Special Correspondent

In his key-note address, Mr. Akhtarul Wasey, raised a question: “since we are in minority in India, we Muslims often complain about being deprived of our basic rights, but what about the Muslim majority countries where we are not willing to give the rights to the minorities?” He stated that democracy is one of the foundational principles of Islam which was fully institutionalized in the rightly-guided years of early Islam fifteen hundred years ago. “And hence it must not be discarded in today’s Muslim world too”...

Zeeba T Hashmi

Zeeba T Hashmi

What moral repercussions could the judiciary face for falsely sentencing death to the accused? Currently, there are about 8,000 inmates serving on death row. Though it might not be appropriate to state that all verdicts have been unjustified, there is a huge dilemma because of the debatable and loose laws of Pakistan, as we see in case of Aasia Bibi in which the onus of responsibility is on the accused to bring her defence, not on the prosecutor who may just orally claim blasphemy, even without producing any viable proof or by forging evidence, and walk away free……

Dr. Elias Akleh

Dr. Elias Akleh

Zionist leaders know very well that in order to accomplish their Zionist project they have to evict the Palestinians out of the land. They use supremacist religious ideology to brainwash and to manipulate naïve Jews to do this dirty job. Thus, Judaism has become the driving force for Zionism. Palestinian forced eviction and ethnic cleansing are the operating mode of Zionism….

Syed Jamaluddin Waqar, Tr. New Age Islam

While the Tablighi Jama’at has
brought about radical reforms at the religious level among the Meos, it has
made no tangible achievement at the social level. Meo women continue to toil
hard like chattel in the fields. They don’t receive their religious right and
share in property. Dowry is rampant. The literacy rate among the Meos is a mere
10 per cent. Only two among a hundred Meo girls are literate. ...it also shows
how the Tablighis view the religion of Islam. They consider Deen (religion) as
something diametrically different from and vehemently opposed to Dunya (the
world).

Mike Ghouse

Mike Ghouse

Saudi Arabia or Iran may not support free speech that is their problem and not Islam's problem. Islam does not have a problem in case the right wing nuts want to make it. My strongest argument with Hannity and Geller was -- I do not want America to change for Ghannouchi, I do not want our constitution be compromised for Ghannouchi, and I do not want our character to change for Ghannouchi. We don't want to ban Maher because he says unpalatable things….

Ifrah Waqar

When politics plays, the poor die. That has been there for thousands of years and will remain there for as long as humans live, and their aspirations live. John Milton’s assertion that “the root of all evil is man” often seems true, especially when it comes to politics—the most favourite game of human beings. It is favourite because it gives them power. The power—an illusion, man has been haunted by for millennia. Everything that comes in the way of this illusion is enemy, whether it is innocent or guilty, he or she, concerned or unconcerned….

G.E

The Chinese
government has invested heavily in Xinjiang, including in infrastructure and
oil and gas extraction. But critics note that many of the best jobs for these
projects have gone to ethnic Han Chinese. Meanwhile the government has
intensified its controls on religious activity in Xinjiang. In July the region
experienced more violence at the end of the holy month of Ramadan……

Stephen Schwartz

Evin Prison in Tehran and the Rajai-Shahr Prison in Kavar have, additionally, been used by the Iranian state to hold members of the Gonabadi-Nimatullahi Sufi order. These Muslim contemplatives, with a history in Iran dating back centuries, and representing the largest public Sufi group in the country, have undergone an extraordinary campaign of suppression. Their intense persecution began in 2006 with the official destruction of a Sufi house of observance in the religious centre of Qom.......

Emanuel Stoakes

On arrival in Manama airport, Maryam was reportedly approached by security officials who tried to take her mobile phone. She resisted, which led to her being charged with assaulting a police officer, and arrested. At the time of writing she is awaiting trial for the latter offence, as well the crime of “insulting the King”. These charges, her family report, are “very serious”, and may result in significant jail time. Needless to say, her treatment is widely perceived as having everything to do with her status as a high-profile government critic, and very little with legitimate issues of law or justice….

Stephen Schwartz

The jailed ayatollah appealed previously for the abolition in Iran of all restrictions on women's rights and of such punishments as stoning. He has released a concise statement of his views, which are summarized under the simple title, "Secularism." While in prison, he voluntarily abandoned his clerical turban as a protest against the state ideology of "Velayat-e Faqih," or rulership by religious jurists. He wrote, "the non-secular, so-called 'Islamic' religious government in Iran so disadvantages and damages the people, and its effects are so negative, widespread and profound, that they demolish the people's pride in and honor [toward] Islam's religious founders. . . . Secularism is the only way to save Iran from continued material and spiritual regression.".....

K M Zubair

In place of such a cruel and outrageous way of disposing of the prisoners of war, Islam preferred to spread them in the population and thus brought them in contact with individual human beings. Over and above, their guardians were ordered to treat them well. The result of this humane policy was that most of the men who were captured on foreign battlefields and brought to the Muslim countries as slaves embraced Islam and their descendants produced great scholars, imams, jurists, commentators, statesmen and generals of the army. So much so that later on they became the rulers of the Muslim world.….

Katrina Swett and Mary Ann Glendon

Religious freedom conditions in China have continued to deteriorate, particularly for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims. To inhibit the growth of independent Catholic and Protestant groups, the government has arrested leaders, shuttered churches and selected Catholic bishops without Vatican approval. The Falun Gong and other groups deemed “evil cults” face long-term imprisonments, forced renunciations of faith and torture in detention. Saudi Arabia still restricts public expression of any religion besides Islam, allowing no non-Muslim houses of worship. Favouring its own interpretation of Sunni Islam, the government arrests and detains Shi’a dissidents and imprisons individuals for apostasy, blasphemy and sorcery……

Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey

"Islamists" as a presumably monolithic term are frequently cited for terror, but Muslims are also the most numerous victims of human rights abuses by other Muslims and non-Muslims. The challenge for both Muslims and the international community is to counter the hijacking of the Muslim identity by extremists and also to respond to the victimization of all, including Muslims who are targeted by bigotry as well co-coreligionists…..